The Road to Hell is Paved with Dialectics: On Christopher J. Arthur’s The Spectre of Capital

What if we were actors in a play, and somebody saw it all tangled together.

Wouldn’t that be the confusions of all confusions!

— Ludwig Tieck

So fears the fictional spectator within the third act of Ludwig Tieck’s Die verkehrte Welt (Tieck 1978: 87). By the time it nears its conclusion, the 1797 play has become a quadruple play-within-a-play-within-a-play-within-a-play, with the character audience unable to tell what is fiction and what is reality, with Tieck undermining conventional narration as a parable of poetic fantasy and Romantic irony, part of that comic heritage extending from Aristophanes and Cervantes, up to Ludvig Holberg and Laurence Sterne. A verkehrte Welt was a recurrent cultural motif, with a similarly titled play appearing in 1683 by Christian Weise, as well as another by Johann Ulrich von König in 1725, each of which also partook from the Italian tradition of commedia dell’ arte. Heinrich Heine would later, in 1844, give the title Die verkehrte Welt to his satirical poem from the verse cycle Zeitgedichte. Yet the formulation of an ‘inverted world’ after Tieck would go on to acquire a meaning and seriousness through the German tradition altogether independent of his literary whimsy.

Lingering for a moment on how the German verkehrt does not simply mean ‘false’ [falsch]—and that ‘reversed’, ‘turned-around’, ‘upside-down’, ‘backwards’, ‘topsy-turvy’, ‘deranged’, ‘perverse’ and ‘contorted’ are all superior renditions—illuminates the term beyond a simple duality between what is true and what is false.¹ It would be with Hegel and his adoption of the phrase within the third section of Phenomenology of Spirit, ‘Force and the Understanding’, that a physiognomic investigation on how appearances disclose an inverted world would provide the phrase with nuanced philosophical import. Hegel was indeed familiar with Tieck’s work and lauded its use of irony in his introduction to the Lectures on Aesthetics (Hegel 1975: 68). Tieck’s Die verkehrte Welt was also admired by the Schlegel brothers, Wilhelm Grimm, Joseph von Eichendorff and Friedrich Schleiermacher. In fact, ‘Tieck was part of the circle of the Schlegels at Jena just prior to Hegel’s arrival there’ (Verene 1985: 50) in 1801.

Within the Phenomenology of Spirit and in providing alternative ways of characterizing the faculty of Verstand in its experience of the object, Hegel employs the category of force to grasp the non-empirical ground of the empirical. From there, he moves into a more in-depth discussion of appearances (Erscheinungen) and what he calls the supersensible beyond (das übersinnliche Jenseits). Hegel proceeds to a nomological discussion of this essential, supersensible beyond and explores the manner in which non-empirical necessary relations among appearances are the truth of appearances themselves. For Hegel, the sensible world has become unintelligible without the supersensible world. If the sensible world is to be known at all, it must be inverted. What is at issue here is not simply a distinction between what is the case and what seems to be, nor is it a presumption of two separate worlds of the sensible and supersensible, of appearance and reality. Instead, Hegel is calling into question the antithesis between inner and outer, of appearance and the supersensible as two different actualities.

That the true world becomes an inverted world would subsequently be part of a conceptual dialectic inherited by Marx within his critique of political economy,² a mainstay categorial description of the form of appearance both people and things come to assume within the capitalist mode of production. The dialectic of appearance and essence within the form-determinations of value elicits the comprehension of reality as an inversion, a perverted form of social relations in which the objectivity of things comes to acquire a supremacy over and against human beings.

To focus on this particular conceptual thread of Marx’s critique is also at once to elicit a specific legacy of interpreting Marx. Of course different thinkers and schools vary even within the emphasis on the critique of capital as a dialectical and systematic method of presentation (Darstellung or dialektische Entwicklungsmethode) and its form-determination of social relations in and through the appearances of value such as the commodity, money and capital.³ Here, economic categories are themselves objective forms or expressions of definite social relations that assume a fetish-character in which individuals comprise mere ‘character masks’, not of any former self but of the objective social totality itself. As such, this fetish-character of capitalist socialization ‘is here not a matter of an economic conceptual interpretation’ (Reichelt 1982: 168) but, as Marx sketches in the Grundrisse, contains an entire critique of society for which the commodity yields determinate forms of being (Daseinsformen) and determinations of existence (Existenzbestimmungen).

Yet that an inverted, reified world was the central object of critique within Marx’s dialectical exposition of the categories of political economy, a move away from a substantialist readings of value which made Marx indistinguishable from Ricardo’s labour theory of value, would be an approach seldom explored with any great rigour in the Anglophone world. Only within the German tradition beginning at the end of the 1960s, with some contemporaneous Italian and French exceptions, would there blossom interpretations that placed fundamental importance on the dialectical movement of the form-determinations of value for critically conceptualizing the social totality of capitalism, a logical interrelation between form and content whose origins were argued to be found within the categorial development of Hegel’s Science of Logic.⁴ Here began a so-called phase of reconstruction of the critique of political economy, a new adaptation which reconstructed not only Capital and its central categories, but also the notion of critique and Marx’s method of development and exposition, which complicated the longstanding idealism-materialism dichotomy through a nuanced engagement with Marx’s relation to Hegel.⁵

Yet the Anglophone world of Marxist interpretation never on the whole matched the richness and complexity of the German tradition for critically explicating economic categories as perverted or inverted forms (verrückte Formen) of social life, that is, for critically grasping, through a more heavily thematized debt to the logical dynamics of Hegel’s philosophy, the way in which material life becomes dominated by the impersonal and objective forms of value—a critique of capitalism as an inverted or topsy-turvy world and not simply as an economic system based on exploitation.

Yet in recent decades, while bracketing the work of the late Moishe Postone, as well as the journals Capital and Class and Open Marxism, exception ought to be made for the authors of the International Symposium on Marxian Theory (ISMT) debate, particularly the work of Tony Smith, Riccardo Bellofiore, Patrick Murray and Christopher J. Arthur.⁶ Within the ISMT readings, despite their differences, one discovers a strong line of continuity: Hegelian logic ‘was essential for the mature Marx exactly because its idealism accurately reflects the “idealist” and “totalitarian” nature of capitalist “circularity” of capital as money begetting money’ (Bellofiore 2015: 172). The speculative world Marx took to be upside-down shares its inversion with the modus operandi of value’s abstraction from and instantiation of the concrete. Marx was thereby more accurate than he knew when he wrote that ‘Hegel’s standpoint is that of modern political economy’; or that ‘Hegel’s Phänomenologie, in spite of its speculative original sin, gives in many instances the elements of a true description of human relations’ (Marx 1975: 333, 193). It is precisely because of this ‘original sin’ that we find within the development of capitalist society a mode of domination by abstractions. Although Marx always held speculative development to be independent from the development of reality—and in fact it is the conflation of the two that warranted so much attention towards the Young Hegelians—if the similarities between Hegel’s logic and value are maintained, both entailing a domination by abstraction, then how it is that Hegelian logic comes to inscribe social reality from within became a central thread explored by the ISMT authors, most notably for our purposes here, the work of Christopher J. Arthur.

I. Christopher J. Arthur and The Spectre of Capital

For over a century, a prevailing narrative dominated according to which the relation between Hegel and Marx was that of a reversal of the idealist dialectic into its materialist heir, by which Hegelian dialectics was turned ‘off its head, on which it was standing, and placed upon its feet’ (Engels 1990: 383). However, Critical Theory and so-called Western Marxism had already emphasized that the relation of Hegel and Marx is not simply one of idealism versus materialism, since both traditions sought to overcome this kind of dualistic opposition or simple reversal. In recent decades, the Anglophone world, arriving late but wielding strong contributions, started expanding the debate on Marx’s relation to Hegel, making pragmatic use of the best from the different tendencies. Among this discourse is an approach that generally understands the continuity between Hegel and Marx as disclosing a system of categorial relations within a given social order, and that together, their use of a dialectical method of exposition holds the key for conceptualizing the essence of capitalist social reality. This reconstructed relation of Hegel and Marx adopts, with its own varied interpretations, the general perspective that Hegel’s Science of Logic is structurally homologous with Marx’s Capital, an affinity consisting in a ‘systematic dialectic’, whereby the expositional ordering of the categories are arranged to conceptualize an existent concrete whole. This reading, which emphasizes the immanent logical derivation of one category to the next, positions itself in contrast to an ‘historical dialectic’, for which the sequence of categories corresponds to their appearance in history, that is, a causal succession of linear historical stages derived from a historical reconstruction of empirical social practice.

The work of Christopher J. Arthur, specifically with his The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital (2004) and now with his recently published magnum opus, The Spectre of Capital: Idea and Reality (2023), has been pivotal for advancing such an interpretation within the Anglophone world. Here capitalist society is portrayed as a realm of transcendental ideality established by the abstractions of exchange that supervene upon the material world and its relations. This realm of ideality set up by the exchange of commodities suspends the use-value of commodities in the moment of their circulation and only restores their qualitative existence within the moments of production and consumption. Through a dialectic of presence and absence, the abstractions of value give concrete instantiation to their pure empty forms, allotting presence in and through absence, or in Arthur’s words, give ‘the shadow substance’ (Arthur 2004: 162). Arthur’s own dialectic of the value-form is a logical development parallel or ‘homologous’ to Hegel’s categories within the Science of Logic, in so far as the forms of exchange generate pure forms abstracted from their content while articulating the inner structure of a totality and fundamentally establish the requisites for the actuality of the real world. As Arthur begins:

capital is itself ‘Idea’ in much the same sense that Hegel advanced in his philosophy. For him an Idea is not a mental entity, but the full actualisation of a concept, of its ‘truth’, one might say. So capital, as such an Idea, is continually making itself present in reality. This book aims to show that capital is the spectral subject of modernity. (Arthur 2023: xiv)

For Arthur, the self-movement of thought found within Hegel’s Science of Logic follows a similar development in the self-movement of capital. Both trace a logical development of pure forms in which all content is absented. As value, this form actively determines the shape and contour of material production. It is as such that Hegel’s logical dialectic stands as an optimal model for value-form theory: a theory of forms organized as a systematic development of categories directed towards articulating an internally structured totality that supports itself in and through its own inner moments and relations. For Arthur, such is the conceptual architectonic of Hegel’s notion of the ‘Idea’ and no less of capital.

Hegel the pan-logician, purveyor of a false ontology for which the abstract subordinates the concrete and in so doing procures an inverted world, is thus the precise Hegel, even if inaccurately interpreted, for illuminating the peculiar form of domination characteristic of the capitalist mode of production. Hegel thus inadvertently outlines the ideal logic of capital, as a practical abstraction imposing itself upon human beings.

Such a framework is already present in Arthur’s earlier book, The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital. What The Spectre of Capital offers is not merely an extension of the thesis of the earlier book, but a step-by-step reconstruction of the categories of Marx’s critique of political economy closer to the sequential architecture of Hegel’s logic. While the former, as a collection of independent essays, outlines various themes of the Hegel-Marx relation and the importance of a ‘systematic dialectic’, the latter provides that dialectic in all of its meticulous categorial detail. The book as such is divided into two main parts, the first offering a series of essays justifying various components of the systematic-dialectical method of presentation as a self-reproducing immanent development of categories which retrospectively validates the ones that had preceded, thereby giving to the constructed totality as a whole a set of synchronic moments that posit their own presuppositions. The second part is the actual meat and potatoes: the systematic-dialectical presentation itself of the forms of capital, beginning from the most abstract given progressive and greater concretion, and culminating in the ‘Idea’ of capital—that moment in the logical structure where the ideal makes itself real, a unity of the abstract and concrete by which the latter is shaped according to the logic of the former. For Hegel, the Idea is the unity of the concept and objectivity whose content is what the concept gives to itself in the form of external otherness. The Idea is as such not a subjective representation or Gedankending but, as Hegel describes in the Science of Logic, ‘the objectively true’; the Idea ‘has the entire essentiality of the objective world in its concept’ (Hegel 2010: 670, 696). The Idea is the unity of the subjective concept and objectivity, or the externalization of the concept within the objective world; it is everything actual and through which the concept acquires realization. Like the concept, the Idea is not therefore an idea of something, but that which ‘is essentially concrete, because it is the free Concept that determines itself and in so doing makes itself real.’ (Hegel 1991: 287) The reality of the world, despite its external heterogeneity, only has coherence through the concept, and in the latter’s development, integrates, through the Idea, objective reality within itself. It is only here, in the end, that the concrete becomes fully concrete, as the idea for which ‘being has attained the significance of truth; it now is, therefore, only what the idea is’ (Hegel 2010: 672).

The Idea of capital is thus no mere method of thought but a particular structure belonging to the objectivity of a hellish reality, to die Sache selbst. For both Hegel and Arthur, the dialectic concerns the conceptual determinations of objectivity. It is not simply that thought and its object coincide but that the totality of determinations procures an absolute identity with itself. As Arthur makes clear: ‘When I argue that the object of critique should be the Idea of capital, I do not mean by this “ideas about capital”, but that what confronts us is itself Idea in the Hegelian sense of an identity of concept and reality’ (Arthur 2023: 23). Capital takes possession of the materiality of production and consumption for the purpose of exchange. It is the reconstitution of use-value and the concrete in and through their negation within circulation.

The most original contribution of Arthur’s approach is to contend that Marx prematurely introduced discussion of the labor theory of value, and that it should have waited until after the form of capital had been introduced. Additional differences, within an overall reordering of the sequential development of select categories in both Marx and Hegel, include clarification on the infamous ‘transformation problem’ (or ‘procedure’, in Arthur’s words) of value and prices, as well as an interpretation of rent as supplementary, not essential, to the core Idea of capital. In a word, Arthur provides a number of departures from the conceptual apparatus of Capital, all of which are too intricate and subtle to traverse in depth here. Yet the overall heuristic guiding such an ambitious proposal to rewrite Marx’s Capital, which is helpfully accompanied by a number of categorial diagrams, appendices and a terminological glossary, remains Hegel’s logical structure, admittedly with some importance differences. Most notable is the beginning. What Arthur calls the ‘upward pointed spiral’ of Hegel’s Seinslogik of Being into Nothing and their unity in Becoming and thereafter in Determinate Being (Dasein) holds the methodological insight for the inverted concretization of value’s emptying formalism, described as a ‘downward spiral’ of a ‘hellish dialectic’ (Arthur 2023: 54) that alternatively starts from Nothing and acquires Being.

In this process, the incommensurability of the use-values of two commodities becomes momentarily displaced during the equalization of the exchange process. Value thereby comes to be realized in the exchange process through the negation of use-value in which the sensuous or qualitative aspects of the commodities are momentarily expelled by the quantitative equivalence of exchange. And yet, for Arthur, this negation of use-value acquires a positive presence in the form of money and capital, each of which take possession of the materiality of production and consumption for the purpose of exchange. Within capitalist society, production is production for exchange and in this way, the concreteness of the world is brought into existence by the abstract objective force of value.

This inversion of the abstract and the concrete constitutes the development of the different forms of value beginning with its elemental form as the commodity. It is through this process that the sensuous world becomes subsumed by the supersensible. The constant expulsion and affirmation of concrete reality constitutes the essential movement of value, a process whereby the negation of use-value during exchange in turn objectifies itself, or negates its negation, by instantiating concrete reality through its development of forms (Gestaltungsprozess). For Arthur, this is an essential process by which an abstract emptiness acquires concrete constitutive power. Such is the manner in which value gives itself its own reality, an autonomy through what Arthur terms ‘practical abstraction’, constituting the world in its own image. Through the form determinations of value more closely guided by Hegel’s logic, Arthur thus proceeds to build a social reality constituted through or mediated by the forms of appearance of value.

Arthur’s thesis, extracted from an intricate engagement with Hegel’s logic, is thus that in a developed capitalist economy, we find a most peculiar historically specific dynamic by which exchange-value is constituted by the negation of use-value. It is what allows him to assert that practice within capitalist society generates a form of social ideality, developing itself into a world of pure forms not of anything in particular, but as part of value as an empty form that, in the form of capital, produces material content out of itself, a determinate absence giving to itself presence. This is the engine of Arthur’s entire systematic dialectic: a categorial development by which the empty form of value gives itself, in the form of capital, objective actuality, an ideally infinite process by which capital becomes actual through a false social ontology.

II. The status of the dialectic and the problem of homological beginnings

In assessing the accomplishments of The Spectre of Capital, we will explore three points interspersed with some critical appraisal. First, it is important to situate Arthur’s approach within the long tradition of investigating the Hegel-Marx relation and the status of the dialectic therein. Second, we will offer a few remarks regarding Arthur’s interpretation of both Hegelian and Marxian dialectics in so far as Arthur [or Marx??] starts from the logic of commodity exchange and the role of abstraction, as opposed to the logic of money as measure. Finally and notably worth reflecting upon is Arthur’s own ‘homology thesis’ with regard to the Hegel-Marx relation, specifically the problem of beginnings for such a comparative analysis.

(I) On the hegel-marx relation and the problem of dialectics

As has already been mentioned, The Spectre of Capital can be viewed as Arthur’s magnum opus, one in which the author has taken on a challenge that until today has remained unresolved, namely to clarify and indeed optimize for critique the relation between Hegelian and Marxian dialectics. Since its beginnings, Marxism has clung to a hitherto unsatiated longing to bring together from Hegel’s philosophy both Spirit and Logic with a theory of social mediation and Marx’s critique of the capitalist mode of production. Yet in several countries around 1968 and the contemporaneous renewal of Marxism, this project translated into intensive discussion. Central here became the question of how to interpret Marx’s ‘materialist turn’, that is, Marx’s relatively vague but often discussed passages in the afterword of the second edition of Capital Vol. I. Here it was remarked that in Hegel, the dialectic is ‘standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell’ (Marx 1996: 19). Classical or traditional Marxism sought to deal with the relation as a derivation of Spirit from material reality, and had understood by this material reality mediation through labour, production and social practice, but also social contradictions, especially between classes and between social production and its capitalist conditions, yet also sometimes material and matter with a concept of nature. Only with so-called Western Marxism and the first generation of Critical Theory from the early 1920s did the materialism of social forms come into view, namely with the commodity and value-form. Not only are labour, production and practice always already mediated by these social and particularly capitalist forms, but this mediation is constitutive both for the objectivity of capitalist society (as the substance of value) and for the subject of this society and its forms of thinking and rationality. The pioneer works and initial impulses came at that time from Lukács, Rubin, Korsch, Pashukanis, Sohn-Rethel, Benjamin and Adorno. Here, Marx’s ‘materialist turn’ was conceived less in the sense of a derivation; it was more a matter of scouring—more modestly and yet perhaps more radically—the commodity form for a kind of analogy or structural homology between Hegel’s concept of mediation and the forms of social mediation outlined in Marx’s Capital.

Yet it was only in the wake of the new Marx interpretations and readings of Capital in the run-up to the long year of 1968 that a logical-categorical reading of Capital emerged, especially, but not exclusively, in the German-speaking world. And just as there was a new discussion about Marx, so too was there also a new discussion about Hegel from the 1960s onwards.⁷ What was decisive for clarifying the relationship between Hegel and Marx was to give focus to the method of exposition (Darstellung, which in German is far richer than any possible English translation as it encompasses ‘exposition’, ‘(re)presentation’, ‘depiction’, ‘illustration’, but also ‘articulation’, and even ‘performance’ and ‘enactment’). Three elements were here crucial for understanding method—crucial, in fact, in order to be able to appropriately relate both Spirit and capital: (1) the logical-categorial reading of the development of the categories in Hegel and Marx; in Marx’s case, this concerned the beginning of Capital specifically, which was fundamental for the analysis of the value-form, a point of great importance also to Arthur’s exposition. (2) The mode of Darstellung was understood as a reaction to a problem of representation. The dialectic is thus the expression of an admitted embarrassment ‘given’ by the thing itself—Spirit, logic and capital—and its inner necessity and negative essence. The dialectic is thus first and foremost critique. Hegel and Marx do not provide a positive science or affirmative theory in the traditional sense, and in the case of Marx, what is not at issue, despite the claims of classical Marxism and especially Marxism-Leninism, is a ‘scientific socialism’, a ‘theory of history’ or a ‘revolutionary science’. Arthur also rejects the exposition as a positive science, but nor is it for him an exposition of the problem of exposition itself. (3) Critique in both Hegel and Marx essentially means critique through exposition and exposition through critique. Accordingly, it became necessary to read Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and the Science of Logic alongside Marx’s Capital as a logical-categorical development and critical exposition, again in line with Arthur’s approach.

Thus Arthur belongs to the tendency of a systematic, logical-categorial interpretation of Marx that seeks to clarify the relationship between Hegelian and Marxian dialectics through the method of an immanent development of their respective categories. Arthur draws extensively from the Science of Logic, which has been, over the decades, usually overshadowed by Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Moreover, even when the Science of Logic was consulted, its purely logical status was usually not clearly distinguished from Hegel’s Phenomenology, which sought to establish a different, precisely phenomenological manner of self-exposition of a nascent Absolute. Even further, both in turn must be distinguished from what Hegel calls Realphilosophie, a distinction that gets occasionally conflated in Arthur’s investigation, specifically in those passages that deal with commodities as real things of matter and properties within an otherwise purely logical exposition.

Nevertheless, one problem remains: in order to be able to put Hegel and Marx’s dialectics in relation to one another, and thus the relation between Spirit and capital, the status of each must be clarified in advance, as it were. Whether the relation is treated in the strong sense as a derivation or as an understanding of Spirit as an idealist and perverted expression of the material world, or as the materialism of social practice, as in classical Marxism, or simply as a kind of analogy or structural homology beyond the opposition of materialism and idealism—decisive in any case is the status of the method of critique and exposition, which must first be put into relation. Indeed such a status, in a certain sense, is already the common ‘object’ for both Hegel and Marx; or rather, more modestly but also more radically, it is the common problem of exposition, which is posed by both Spirit and capitalist society, thus calling for a new, different and precisely dialectical mode of exposition, a problem of exposition as such that could have been given greater attention in Arthur’s investigation.

Unfortunately, hardly any material from the German Neue Marx-Lektüre, nor from more recent German Hegel scholarship, has been translated into English, which may serve as an excuse for the fact that aside from some scattered references to other ISMT authors, all German literature dealing with the precise topic is effectively absent from The Spectre of Capital. As much as Arthur and the ISMT authors deserve credit for introducing the relationship between Marxian and Hegelian dialectics into Anglophone discussions, and for situating that discussion in terms of the logical relationship between categories, especially Marx’s development of value and money, this ran parallel to, rather than in conjunction with, discussions of the Hegel-Marx relation in (West) Germany,⁸ a point that refutes Arthur’s claim, early on in the book, that such a focus has been ‘unusual in the tradition of Hegelian Marxism’ (Arthur 2023: 1).

In any case, these discussions died down with the end of the ‘red decade’ and are still considered inconclusive today. The debates were hard-fought without achieving general agreement, and are widely regarded today as doomed to failure from the outset, especially from the perspective of professional, academic philosophy. Yet still today there remains disagreement over what dialectics means for both Hegel and Marx. Without respective clarification, it remains difficult to put them into relationship with each other. Thus the problem is the entire status of each dialectic, but also how and where to start thinking their relation.

Let us focus on these two points for assessing Arthur’s investigation: the status of Hegel’s dialectic and the question of a beginning for any homology between Hegel’s Science of Logic and Marx’s Capital. A strong candidate here is the question of quantification, a dimension not missing from Arthur’s analysis, but perhaps underestimated. Quantification here refers to the pure Being (in Marx’s case, purely social), which both Hegel and Marx develop as the negative quality of identity that brings forth objectivity, an objectivity that undergoes processual development and self-referentiality in both Spirit and capital.

(II) How to ‘socialize’ Marx’s critique of political economy—with Kant or Hegel?

There is a long discursive history of attempting to derive money from the logic of commodity exchange and of interpreting Marx’s value-form analysis as the genesis of money from exchange: from the historical approaches of classical Marxism, to the more logical approach of Critical Theory and its students, the thinkers of Western Marxism and to current trends of post-Marxism. Although Arthur argues that his ‘homology thesis’ between Hegel’s logic and Marx’s concept of value ought to be grasped as a retroactive circle, with the categories positing their own presuppositions, he still nevertheless interprets money as derived from commodity exchange and exchangeability. Commendably, here Arthur reaches as far as one can, albeit within the limits of remaining tied only to the logic of exchange, exchangeability and abstraction.

However, to derive abstract forms and money from the logic of (commodity) exchange is not only a myth of bourgeois economics, it also verges on a fairly vulgar sociological approach. Instead, Marx’s critique of political economy ought to be read as a critique of this idea. We can thus pose the question: why does Marx labour over the value-form analysis, why all the effort in renewing a methodology, a new way of exposition, even a rewriting of Marx’s Capital, when value and abstract forms come from abstraction and logic of exchange? If that were the case, wouldn’t formal logic and sociological methods suffice? The same might be true for Hegel’s dialectic. What of all the problems Hegel faced in the Seinslogik, of Determinate Being, the Spurious and True Infinite, Essence, etc., when it is, in the last instance, a logic of exchange from which a common negative Being and form of reflexive mediation as Essence emerges?

Apart from the fact that to derive abstract forms from an abstraction amounts to a tautology, more worrying is the idea that abstract, ideal forms as determining of their own content which must be reflected to be constitutive of objects and objectivity, and thus practically form material, is Kantian, not Hegelian. The imposition of abstraction by the ideality of abstract forms upon the economy and social life has been a tendency of critique pursued in the tradition of Sohn-Rethel and Critical Theory; in the case of Sohn-Rethel, with Kant instead of Hegel, and in the case of Adorno, who sought to remain critically open with Kant, the predominance of what in Hegel leads to a hermetic closure and reconciliation by the logic of identity. In large part, The Spectre of Capital reads as a variation on Sohn-Rethel, who claims that the real and practical abstraction made by commodity exchange brings forth abstract forms to both social synthesis and synthesis of the intellect, but through science subsumes material production and becomes the form which determines the labour and production process of commodities.

But with Hegel, an ideal form does not assert its own content through an abstraction from that content, be it in a constitutive (Sohn-Rethel) or in a subsumptive manner (Adorno). The world is neither particularly determined and concrete, nor undetermined material in itself which then gets determined by abstract forms; nor do abstract forms produce and determine labor, commodities, material or society through form. The status of Hegel’s dialectic and its critical kernel is rather to be found in its aspect of wielding speculative identity, that ‘most important aspect of dialectic’ (Hegel 2010: 35; see also Hegel 1984: 280 and Hegel 1991: 131).

At first glance, this speculative identity—the systematic unfolding of determinate relations within the dialectic that comprehends the unity of opposites—seems to concern thinking and being, subjectivity and objectivity in Hegel, and money and purely social being, that is, value, in Marx. It is as if the realization of this speculative identity is precisely what is interpreted by both Hegel and Marx as the negative essence of mediation. Arthur also gives attention to the negativity of a separation that is at once also a mediation. However, this is only the ‘exoteric’ side of speculative identity. The ‘esoteric’ side, as it were, is that this speculative identity is always already sublated on both sides, subject and object and money and value respectively, such that both sides are to be understood as reflected in themselves. For Hegel, this speculative identity of objectivity with itself has its origin in the negativity that lies in separating subject and object in the first place, and in having to discover the necessity of their mediation in the negativity of this separation, namely as self-mediation. How can one think from this self-relation—and therein lies the quasi-esoteric, immanent necessity, which is to be revealed and explicated through dialectics—is what is at stake in the principle of identity within conceptualization. Negativity is, on the one hand, suspended on the side of an objectivity that is released into the independence and freedom of having to find determination through nothing but itself; its speculative identity with itself thus lies in a being that is released into this necessity of determination through itself, such that being is an immediate relation of reflection, an existence reflected into itself, and also has in this self-reflection its concept in itself, yet without consciousness of it. And this very objectivity, which has its concept in an unconscious and immediate reflection in itself, must be identified as such by the concept in a subjective sense, so that objectivity comes to itself through its other, while the concept is consciousness of exactly this. Therein lies the actuality of the concept: to identify thinking with an objectivity that is released into this freedom and immediacy to be determined by itself.

In an analogous way, money realizes a (pure) social being that also acquires independence and has to find its determination by its own social relations. Money realizes this social (self-)relation in the values of the commodities, as if it were ever reflected in itself in an immediate and unconscious manner. Thus it seems as if money merely seeks only to identify in its own validity and own value, the immanent and thus objective relations of commodities and the relations of their production. It reflects an objectivity that is already reflected in itself. However—and herein lies the subjectivity of money’s capital-form—money is externalized in the components of the production of this objectivity, and after the realization of the results of production, it is again de-objectified into those components. On the one hand, money as a measure of value and as a means of exchange objectifies and mediates social relations that are determined by itself and reflected in itself and has its own concept in the magnitudes of values. But on the other hand, money as capital constantly transforms the realized magnitudes back into the relations of their valorization in production, becoming a self-referential quasi-subjective form, analogous to the concept. Through money, all individual subjects can rationally calculate, reconcile and even identify, with quantitative exactitude, the immanence of social relations and their objectivity. But at the same time, this is a calculation and reconciliation with the supra-individual, quasi-automatic self-identification of money itself: individual subjects must reckon with this self-identification speculatively.

The sole purpose here is to mark the status of value and money: the logic of identification and the speculative identity of value and money is considerably different from the logic of exchange and abstraction. For this logic of identification, the quantification of (social) relations is crucial, a quantification found in both Hegel’s Science of Logic and Marx’s value-form analysis—not as a logic of exchange and by abstraction, negation, reduction, subsumption, etc., as if emphasized in Arthur’s investigation, but by the logic of measurement.

(III) The fatal paradigm of the logic of exchange and abstraction: quantification as technique of measurement

As much as Arthur rightly rejects both a historical and causal logical derivation of money from commodity exchange, The Spectre of Capital is nevertheless stymied by the logic of commodity exchange. Ultimately, Arthur attempts to derive money from commodities and value, despite all the assertions that we are dealing with a circular logic or retroactive dialectic by which value and commodity return to their ground.

It was the critical insight of the Neue Marx-Lektüre that Marx’s value-form analysis does not analyse commodity exchange, but the failure of such an exchange. Commodity exchange must fail in so far as it always presupposes money from the outset. In this respect, money cannot be derived from a logic of exchange or from a value that always already presupposes money. Moreover, that money mediates and exchanges commodities and contains its own logical or historical genesis is precisely the necessary semblance that must be criticized.

For such an immanent critique of both bourgeois economics and any mythology of the origins of money and of the semblance that money itself produces, it is necessary to develop a different theory of money and value not based on exchange and abstraction, not leading to subsumption of labour and material production under the immaterial pure forms of capital, as is the case with Arthur. Rather, for that different logic, it is indeed of decisive importance to read Marx with Hegel. Here the status of Hegel’s Science of Logic and dialectics is central for the starting point of a homology between value and Being. Arthur begins by placing Hegel’s beginning of Logic, ‘Being’ and ‘Nothing’, in relation to commodity, exchange, abstraction and exchangeability, and he places Hegel’s Being and Nothing as a nothing that is, an absence, as explored above, acquiring presence. Yet what remains otherwise absent in Arthur’s homology is the speculative identity of Being and Nothing: their passing over (Übergehen or Becoming). Übergehen, however, is what is developed over the course of the entire Seinslogik, yet also in the Wesenslogik and Begriffslogik. The Übergehen or ‘passing over’ is what allows for the thinking of objectivity from its own immanence and inner necessity (or, in short, from its Being) and, at once, for identifying its logic with thinking. Value would have to be homologically developed through this Übergehen as the speculative identity of Being and Nothing and their absolute difference; it is the passing over in form to determine Being by nothing other than itself, which Hegel expounds as the negation of negation, sublated in Something and Other as their Determinate Being. This Übergehen and form of determining through negation becomes reflexive when it is taken as one and quantified. This quantification turns the relations of Being into quantitative relations, akin to an immediate and unconscious reflection, making explicit the truth of Quality as Quantity in and through the form of determination by negativity. This is a dramatically different logic from that of exchange and abstraction. It develops the speculative identity, in which Being makes itself the object of determination as an immediate and unconscious reflection, and this is what society is revealed to ‘be’ by money as a measure, not by money as a means of exchange. Just as Being is set by the concept to be determined and decisive for itself and therein objective, so likewise is social being exposed by money as a measure decisive for its own relations, determined by all commodities which in this measure shares one and the same being in a purely quantitative manner. Through money as a measure of value, social relations are situated within the realm of quantifiability, and quantifying means converting social relations into quantitative ones in one fell swoop, thereby at once realizing and revealing their objective truth, their pure Being and identical quality in a quantitatively determined manner.

This becomes real when the measure of value becomes the means to realize social relations by transforming them into quantitative Being. Here measure takes the form of mediation. It is precisely as such that the difference between Being and Essence corresponds to the difference between money as a measure of value and as the means of its realization. The Being of society is kept indifferent to itself, but at the same time in a state of measurability and quantifiability, and this measurement and quantification becomes practical in the form of the mediation of things as commodities and through the realization of their value. In this form of realization, money realizes social objectivity as if it is reflected in itself, by the relation of commodities, just as Hegel’s Wesenslogik reflects Being as an Übergehen and a turn into quantity that already amounts to reflection, the immanent and unconscious self-reflection of objectivity.

With these remarks, it can be said that Arthur does not clearly distinguish money as measure of value (the logic of Übergehen) from money as means for the realization of value (the logic of reflection of determinate beings, or Essence), and finally from the self-reference of money as capital (the logic of the concept and money as subjectivity in which objectivity becomes reflexive outside itself, while money reflects its being in its own other). This last step towards the logic of subjectivity would demonstrate that money realizes in commodity values the productive power of the components of production and of valorization, into which money has been externalized and into which it will once again enter. In short, in the Being of commodities, in their value, money measures its own essence as capital; or, money measures what it itself is worth in its own other, in the forms of labor and capitalist means of production. This logic of (self-)measurement corresponds to the logic of identification through which the entire Science of Logic pivots, and that corresponds, if a homology is sought, to the method of how money, through its functions and self-referentiality as capital, identifies itself with the social being that it realizes and mediates as values and for which it becomes a form of their valorization. Capitalism is a measureless process in so far as money constantly determines the relevant magnitudes decisive for the productive valorization of labour and the forms of capital, thus for the productive capitalist use of the measuring money itself. The three determinations of money as measure, means and method of valorization correspond to how, according to Hegel’s Science of Logic, the concept can think objectivity and identify itself with that objectivity in the speculative sense, that is, by knowing itself in the other of itself.

This is ultimately what money realizes in value: not an abstraction from use-value or concrete labour, as Arthur’s approach suggests, but a speculative identity. Money realizes a correspondence between its own value and the productive power that results from the relation between labor-power and capital, exposed in commodities and explicated in their circulation and in their magnitudes. This logic of quantification qua measurement has nothing to do with exchange and abstraction, but with the abrupt change in the status of the Being of social relations. Money as measure exposes society to two different states: the Being of social relations by measure is held in indifference to itself, quantitatively blurred and indeterminate before the technique of measurement becomes practical. Only when money realizes value as the immanent relation of capitalist society does it appear as the property of a thing. These two different states and their change creates the semblance of an exchange process and a transformation of values into prices—themselves two common misinterpretations within Marxism.

So if one follows Arthur seeking a homology, then the starting point would be the necessity of the unity or speculative identity of money and value, which results from the measurement of the productive power of valorization through money’s self-relation as capital. If Arthur, on the other hand, posits that commodities are things for exchange and their pure being is exchangeability, he ‘solves’ the question of the quality of quantitative relations in the same manner as that of the objective theory of value which he himself rightly rejects. Here the difference is that the substance of value as always already presupposed by labour is replaced by the identical, pure and negative quality of value given by abstraction and the logic of exchange and exchangeability. Value, once given as a negative quality or the quality of identity, can then be quantified, mediated, circulated and (re)produced throughout the entire analogy between value in Marx’s Capital and Hegel’s Seinslogik (and further in the Wesenslogik and Begriffslogik). However, a process of valorization which measures itself in money and which by the magnitudes measured becomes decisive for the productive valorization of its two components—this process radically differs from a logic of abstraction and exchange as followed by Arthur. The functions of money, its validity and its own value are rather to be developed as the logic of measurement itself in its own other, in the valorization process, and this self-measurement corresponds to the speculative identity of object-subject that Hegel develops as the logic of the self-identification of Being in thought in his Science of Logic.

Yet surely this is not the place to elaborate on such an alternative logical development. We wish only to demonstrate an alternative to the long path of determining the relation between value, money and capital via the logic of commodity exchange and abstraction, a path that extends from the young Lukács via Sohn-Rethel and Critical Theory, to current post-Marxist theorists, a path on which Arthur ultimately still trudges—perhaps even having reached its summit.

III. Conclusion

For Marx, the dialectic is a method of exposition that, inherited from Hegel, holds the key for critically conceptualizing the essence of social reality constitutive of the capitalist mode of production. It articulates the social relations of a given and inherently antagonistic social order. It is a method immanent to its own object—that is, capitalist social relations. The dialectic does not as such proceed as a mere formal application to any arbitrarily given object of analysis. As Marx wrote to Engels in 1858 criticizing Lassalle, ‘it is one thing for a critique to take a science to the point at which it admits of a dialectical presentation, and quite another to apply an abstract, ready-made system of logic to vague presentiments of just such a system’ (Marx 1983a: 261). There is something specific about the capitalist mode of production that implies an immanently dialectical mode of exposition for its own logical mode of reproduction. Adorno captures this when he describes dialectics as ‘the ontology of the wrong state of things’ (Adorno 2007: 11).

It is to Arthur’s credit that this dimension of the dialectic has been brought to the fore, a ‘hellish dialectic’ that proceeds by giving the falsehood of an inverted world explicit and intricate systematic construction. The Spectre of Capital explicitly thematizes that hell in its expositional ordering, comprehends a totality wherein systematically interconnected categories express their moments as existing synchronically and mutually presupposing one another within an architectonic whole. It is a methodological procedure of conceptual retroactive grounding, one through which every category acquires further truth only through its subsequent one, rather than by a progressive deduction or simple propositional definition. In this sense, Arthur makes clear that the dialectic is not an historical, efficient causality, but an exposition of a given whole which reproduces itself under its own logical necessity, dragging human beings along with it.

Despite this momentous achievement for returning to the dialectic its menacing sneer, a final word is warranted on the dual ontology emblematic of the book’s subtitle: Idea and Reality. It is Arthur’s aim to explicate an ontological distinction between the material and the ideal in and through a reconstruction of the categories of value, how the ideal movement of capital comes to inscribe itself within material reality. In a sense, Arthur makes clear that such a dualism is in fact a dynamic of the single false social ontology that is capitalist society. And yet Arthur wants it both ways: the pure forms of value both inscribe material reality according to its own image while a residue of empirical otherness remains.

Arthur’s analysis has the merit of sobering those ‘who are always in a hurry to address the material content’ (Arthur 2023: 11), which, through the investigation, is convincingly argued as only warranting address once the general form of capital has been expounded. Yet in the last chapters of the book such material content returns with a vengeance, namely in the form of living labour, nature and even use-value, the latter of which is occasionally described as an ‘ahistorical category’ (Arthur 2023: 364), all part of one side of his dual ontology:

The diagnosis I make here is that there are two intersecting ontologies; the ideality of the value form confronts the materiality of production. To be sure, determinants from the latter feed into the former, but only as transformed, so as to become the abstract content of an abstract form. […] the concrete rhythms of the labour process remain external to capital, hence they are not reducible to capital, and are potentially troublesome for its movement. The material ontology is merely combined with the ideal ontology. (Arthur 2023: 362-63)

Of course despite the temptation, one wouldn’t dare refer to Arthur’s architecture as a Platonic theory of value, one whose ideal forms stand over and against its material substrate. Instead, the reader is introduced to formulations like ‘unhappy combination’, ‘interpenetration’ or ‘imposition’ as characterizing the relationship between the two ontologies. Yet there are considerable implications for the scope and depth of critique in whether material reality is understood as given to capital, formed or created by it. For Arthur, it is all at once in so far as his ‘architectonic of capital discriminates the pure logic of the value form, from its imposition on the material underpinnings of capital’ (Arthur 2023: 378), an imposition that gives to the concrete specific social form. Labour, however recalcitrant, indeed logically remains both the result and presupposition of capital.

However, exclusive focus on capital’s ‘pure forms’ independent not only of material reality but also of the historical development of cycles of capital accumulation itself, perhaps places undue emphasis on the dualism of his ontology, a precarious unity between the abstract and the concrete which never quite acquires inner speculative identity within what can otherwise be understood, again, as a single false social ontology. Yet the relation between the Absolute Idea of capital and the reality informed by it over time is beyond the purview of Arthur’s analysis. It is at its strongest when, to return to Hegel, the Logic and Realphilosophie are kept apart, and that it is precisely the caricature of the ‘metaphysical’ or ‘pan-logicist’ Hegel that matters. But here it can be suggested that perhaps taking Hegel with greater fidelity does in fact have implications for Arthur’s concept of capital.

Without the turn to nature and history, Arthur establishes a bulwark against the ‘total subsumption’⁹ of the real to the Idea, potentially lending itself to false appeals to an alleged degradation of use-value by exchange extrinsically eroded by market forces. Yet the materiality of the concrete cannot be elevated as a barometer to vilify the abstraction of exchange, as if the dialectic of the inverted world need only dispense with what erroneously might be conceived as the independence of its material reality. Indeed Arthur wants to hold on to such independence and cannot conceive critique without it (Arthur 2023: 243), despite the fact that both logically and historically, capital thoroughly penetrates material reality, perhaps to the point of sublating the dualism itself. As much is at stake with speculative identity, for which any such dichotomy can only fail to retain its polar independence. One need only glance at the contemporary mandates of urban planning, cosmetic surgery, the neurological rewiring of attention spans, or dietary standards with its genetic modifications to witness the very real material reality of capital’s pure forms. It is literally written on people’s faces, despite considerable recalcitrance. To return to the imagery of Tieck, the sheep are now shearing the shepherds. Arthur makes abundantly clear how implicit in the concept of capital is the impulse to posit its own presuppositions, even as externalities are immanently produced. The mechanisms of Formbestimmtheit means that capital not simply incorporates, but reconstitutes both human and material elements adequate to its own concept. The distinction between erste and zweite Natur has become tenuous at best. Ornithologists have documented certain species of birds to have begun incorporating the ringing of cell phones and car alarms into their own songs.

Despite the occasional association of externality with a standpoint of critique and the posited optimism of labour as a counter-subject to capital (Arthur 2023: 388–89), Arthur of course does not take the significance of capital’s otherness this far, as something wholly other and thus outside the purview of its logical reach. Yet little stands in the way without a more thorough engagement with the transition from logic to nature and history in Hegel, which need not imply final harmony, but rather continues the necessity of the mediation between logic, spirit and nature, between capital and reality, in order to become a totality in the freedom of otherness as a moment of itself. It is a line of thought that warrants greater critical scrutiny towards the autonomy of otherness, towards the idea that ‘whatever transformation the capitalist mode of production may effect on the earth, its externality remains permanently’ (Arthur 2023: 45). The categories of Hegel’s Science of Logic are not simply categories of thought, but determinations of objective relations and spiritual ‘abbreviations’ that permeate the whole of life (Hegel 2010: 14–15). Against Arthur’s intentions, perhaps there is merit, and even greater critical imperative for the critique of political economy, in grasping ‘what Hegel really meant’.